Blog Post - "Comedy, Decades Later"

[b-guy]

Thread for discussion of the first blog post on the Nexus!

https://www.star-traks.com//2022/02/20/ ... king-back/

[cmdrajd]

I thought a lot about questions of whether or not my early stories were still funny or appropriate as I did the conversions for the new website. I hadn't read several of those early stories in literally a couple of decades, and I worried about what might be lurking in there that I didn't remember. I also had concerns about messing with the old stories too much. Those were done without any idea that they might be posted online (there really wasn't much of an online to post to back then beyond newsgroups like alt.startrek.creative), and I can look back at the stories and see myself figuring out how to grow the characters beyond one-note caricatures based on my friends. The semi-standard story format that we've all sort of fallen into now (Short stories around 20-25 pages in set runs) came a lot later.

That's not at all what Brendan was talking about, though. I've drifted from content over to format. Back to the subject at hand, I did tweak some scenes as I did my edits for the new site launch, and I almost cut one story, Reason to Panic, in its entirety. Not to get too bogged down, but the overall reason is that I'm not generally a fan of gender-based humor. Admittedly, though, the Monica Vaughn character does things that I would never have put in a story with the genders reversed. So am I perfect or even internally-consistent on that? No. Not a bit.

Where I've really noticed a glaring hole, though, is in how I represented characters and relationships. If you're looking for such things, you'll notice very quickly that there are almost no descriptions of a character's appearance. At first that was because I was writing these for my friends. We all knew what we looked like, so why would I take the time with that? After I started the Traks website, though, and was writing stories about totally new characters and for an online audience, I kept doing it. Or not doing it. If you asked me then, I would have told you that there weren't any descriptions because I wanted readers to be able to see the characters anyway they wanted to. There was (and still is) a lot of truth to that. The other reason, though, is that I just wasn't good at writing those descriptions so they felt natural and didn't interrupt the flow of the story. The best way to get over that kind of limitation is to find other authors who do it well, see how they handle it, and they work on developing the skill yourself. I did not do that, and I have continued not doing that for almost 30 years now. I know what the characters look like in my head. I used that to give descriptions to the artists who made the picture that's currently on the Waystation page of that crew in the style of Star Trek: Lower Decks. In any case, because of my lack of descriptions, the crews can look however the readers want them to, but that's also a cop out on my part.

As far as relationships go, the characters that have them have all had heterosexual ones. Was that intentional? Absolutely not. But it is my default, so it became my characters' default. It's also a massive failure of imagination on my part. I'm not going to go back and retroactively change anything in the existing stories and series, but it something that I will be more cognizant of in the future.